Yesterday I spent the day in San Francisco at the Domain Roundtable hosted by Jay Westerdal and DomainTools.com (BTW - they've got brilliant tools over there). Since I'm swamped with travel, building decks, and trying to find SEOmoz some new office space, I figured I'd just use the ol' bullet point list. What did I learn?

Some people were surprised that Matt Cutts was speaking. They felt it amounted to an acceptance of the practice of domaining in general and domain squatting in particular (especially since Google helps monetize a large portion of the parked & auto-generated domains on the web). Listening to him speak, I heard nothing of the sort - he was no more lenient on low quality domains than he would be on spam in general, but it's certainly an interesting perspective.

Matt said a few interesting things himself, including:

Geo-targeting and IP delivery is completely different from cloaking and we don't penalize for it, so long as you treat Google like any other user. If you have a special page you're showing because we're from Mountain View or because we're a robot, that could cause problems.

Business.com, Yahoo!, Zeal are all good directories - and if you're building a directory for any reason, make sure it's of real value to users. You don't have to worry about every single link, but do some due diligence and try to nofollow any that you're worried about.

If a domain is parked, Google doesn't want it in the index.

How much content does it take for a domain to be valuable? Enough unique stuff so that it's useful to users.

Owning a keyword match domain name is going to carry some weight in Google for the foreseeable future. It is something they want to reward.

If lots of sites have the same template, that's not really a problem. It's when they don't have anything useful and valuable for users that we try to find them and throw them out. We do use HTML templates as a way to find sites/pages that are low value - we can just search for blocks of code and find all the pages using a certain template and if they all tend to fit this pattern of low value, we can toss them all out together. :)

John Andrews - we had a pretty good time on stage together, shared some jovial banter, and even laughed about our differences. I don't think we're best friends, but I do think (and hope) that a professional level of respect was regained, and that, by itself, made the trip worthwhile.

John showed off his Don't Tell Matt Cutts t-shirt from SEOshirts.com - they mailed it to him as a promotion. It's a pretty clever idea - apparently they mailed one to Vanessa Fox, as well, and she knew all about them, too.

John also made one of the most succinct and intelligent remarks I've heard on the topic of SEO and search-focused web development in a long time. He said, "What is Google's strategy? To provide their users with the best, most relevant results to their queries. If your business doesn't align with Google's strategy, then Google doesn't want to help you."

KeywordDiscovery has some very cool new features and a very usable interface - demoing it on stage was impressive.

SEO.com just made it to the 1st page of Google for the term "SEO" (and SEOmoz fell off that page). Congrats to them, and tell that Rand Fishkin guy he needs to work harder!

Domaintools has a new feature - registrant alert - that lets you monitor a competitor so you receive an update whenever they register a new domain - pretty slick.

I'm off to the LBC tomorrow for SMX Social, so blogging may be light. Jane's coming with me and presenting as well and Rebecca's presenting at the eCommerce Summit in New Orleans, so Q+A will also be slow this week.

I get accused of "sucking up" a lot, but I don't think I'm going to change my writing style or content because of it. If I've been impressed by someone or had a positive experience, I'm going to share it honestly. I just don't have the ego for staying aloof.

I can blame 'building decks" for the reason I haven't been on here much lately, that being the wooden structure on the back of my house. Of course, that's the spare time effort that I'm working on after launching our new site *shameless plug - we launched DSW.com this morning so now you can buy shoes online - and I am officially a shoe salesman!*

Now that we're live after a looooooong journey and lots of hours, I plan on getting back in here to contribute again. One of the first things I want to write about is how the SEO aspect gets put a little lower on the priority list when you're launching a large e-commerce site like DSW's. Most of the major SEO efforts are phase II, but I think it will be pretty amazing when we get them in place. Right now, I'm just looking forward to having some free time to be here again, and reminding my kids who this "dad" guy is.

weird thing is that there are 12 organic results on page 1 for me, including 'latest news from sew' and 'blog posts about seo' (plus 3 indented links to recent blogs for each). i don't think i've seen 12 results on page 1 before.

"If lots of sites have the same template, that's not really a problem. It's when they don't have anything useful and valuable for users that we try to find them and throw them out. We do use HTML templates as a way to find sites/pages that are low value - we can just search for blocks of code and find all the pages using a certain template and if they all tend to fit this pattern of low value, we can toss them all out together. :)"